The spiral of silence in the online space

In an article published in 2006 I demonstrated that the “spiral of silence”, invisible in the real space, becomes visible in the online space: on a blog readers may see the way the dominant opinion is shaped, and also the mechanism which reduces the minorities to silence.

The hypothesis formulated by E. Noelle Neumann are:

1. People build a view about the success of their opinions in the social environment. 2. The disposition of the individuals to express their opinions in public is variable depending on the evaluation they do. 3. If the result of the evaluation means that the own opinion is in contradiction with the dominant social opinion, the individual will not express himself or he/she will convert the opinion to the dominant one. 4. There is a correlation between the evaluation of the present and the anticipation (the belief that the dominant opinion will be the same in the future).5. If an individual thinks that in the future the dominant opinion will change, he/she will adjust his opinions to the tendencies he sees.

An application of this theory in the online space shows that:

(1) In the online space, the representation of the distribution of the opinion is build very easily because the participation means written words (in the real space, the evaluation is made by intuition). (2) The mood of individuals to express themselves  depends less on the majority of opinions and more on the self-evaluation of the information competence. (3) If the evaluation shows that his/her opinion is from the minority, the individual will not express it because of the occasional negative reactions of the others. (4)-(5) The anticipation is weak in the online space, because there are  unexpected trends in the collective opinions.